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Interviews with Fisher and Walton

Derek Fisher:
“We’re more focused on our promise and our potential as opposed to our demise. But both sides of that coin can be dangerous. So now coming into this season, all the talk is about expectations, getting back to having an opportunity to win a championship, and actually winning it. There’s some positives and negatives that come with that also.”

On whether the pressure is a good thing:
“It can be a good thing. It can serve to put the team on notice right away. You’re now in a situation where you’re not just trying to get better or you’re trying to get good, you’re expected to be good. you always expect that from yourself, but sometimes in professional sports, it’s not until everybody else starts to expect it that you think about it.”

On dealing with the Finals loss:
“When it’s first over, it’s so abrupt, you feel like you want to step away for a short period of time. But after a week or two, you start wondering what happened. Why didn’t we win? So you pull out the film and you start seeing what mistakes were made, a lot of the things we didn’t do. Boston deserves to be the champion. They were the best team in the series. But I think when you watch games, you can see things that had nothing to do with your opponent, just concentration, just focus, effort and all the things you can control. If you focus on those things, you’re opponent sometimes doesn’t matter.”

Luke Walton

On what he did this summer:
“I had a fun little ankle surgery, I was on crutches. I had a lot of downtime. It was the first offseason I had to do something like this, so it was a little down, but hopefully it’ll pay off during the season.”

So, what’s your status?
“For the full 5-on-5, probably a couple of weeks. I’ve been stepping it up a little the last couple of weeks on the track, but now we’ve got to get to the cutting and jumping and all that.”

What’s the feeling of the team going into camp?
“It’s way different. Last year was like, even the players were looking around like, ‘Is Kobe coming? Where’s Kobe?’ It’s better this way. Hopefully now we have guys that have worked hard all summer to compete, because we have a very deep team, and I think training camp will be pretty interesting.

“ We know what we have to work on now, and a lot of it is defense. We know we can score points, but the thing we need to do to make sure we achieve our goals is defense.”

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